Year of Hell Part 1
In the Year of Hell '' |image= |series= |production=40840-176 |producer(s)= |story= |script= Brannon Braga Joe Menosky |director=Allan Kroeker |imdbref=tt0709014 |guests= Kurtwood Smith as Annorax, John Loprieno as Obrist, Rick Fitts as Zahl Ambassador, Deborah Levin as Ens. Lang, Sue Henley as Ens. Brooks, Peter Slutsker as Krenim Commandant, Marjel Barrett as Computer Voice |previous_production=Scientific Method |next_production=Year of Hell Part 2 |episode=VGR S04E08 |airdate=5 November 1997 |previous_release=Scientific Method (Overall) Sacrifice of Angels |next_release=Year of Hell Part 2 (Overall) Scientific Method |story_date(s)=51268.4 (March 16 – May 28, 2374) |previous_story= Scientific Method You Are Cordially Invited |next_story= Scientific Method Year of Hell Part 2 }} Summary A huge ship appears in the sky of a distant, alien colony and fires a massive beam, transforming the bustling city below to mountains and fields. As the wave encompasses the planet, the ship's crew comment on the colony's erasure before targeting the species' homeworld. On board Voyager, Captain Janeway is informed by Seven of Nine that the area of space they are in belongs to a species that the Borg know as the Zahl. Upon entering this space, though, a small vessel appears off of Voyager's port bow and begins an unprovoked attack. The ship is a Krenim destroyer, and the captain of the vessel barks an ultimatum at Janeway that Voyager must leave Krenim space or be destroyed. As the ship's weapons prove useless against Voyager's hull, Janeway ignores the ship and proceeds to negotiate with the Zahl, who disdainfully threaten the weaker Krenim vessel. During their discussion, Tuvok receives ship readings that a temporal disruption involving the homeworld of the Zahl race has just occurred. As they stand there trying to understand what has happened, a wave of temporal energy reaches their sector of space. The wave hits all three ships - wiping the Zahl race from existence, making the Krenim vessel bigger and more powerful, and reducing Voyager to a severely damaged state. Now aggressive and more arrogant, the Krenim captain tells Janeway that Voyager must submit to the Krenim Imperium and prepare to be boarded. Janeway instead takes advantage of Voyager's speed and escapes. A scan of the region in the new Astrometrics bay provides the answer: Krenim warships dominate this region of space and it will be hard for Voyager to sneak past them. Voyager begins a running battle with many Krenim ships over a period of two months, suffering heavy damages and casualties; during one attack, Seven of Nine uses an unexploded Krenim chroniton torpedo to devise a method of successfully shielding Voyager against the weapons, however the weapon partially explodes, blinding and severely burning Tuvok. This modification also affects the temporal waves in the region, attracting the attention of the Krenim "time ship", the gigantic ship-based temporal weapon that is causing the temporal disruptions. Krenim scientist Annorax had built the ship to cause "temporal incursions" to be used to erase events from history to strengthen the Krenim Imperium. However, the resulting changes also cause a plague that kills millions of Krenim, including his wife, and Annorax has been seeking a full restoration of his species for the past 200 years. Annorax decides to destroy Voyager due to the temporal distortions caused by its shields. The crew manage to escape using the warp drive as Voyager is faster but this causes even more damage to the ship. Janeway is forced to order all but the senior staff to abandon ship. She and the senior staff remain behind in an attempt to rescue Commander Chakotay and Lt. Paris, who are captured by the time ship. Errors and Explanations Nit Central # Johnny Veitch on Saturday, November 14, 1998 - 2:50 pm: How come the WeaponShip knows exactly what to erase. He just jams it at the Zahl Homeworld and it manages to erase the Zahl and their colony, but the trees and grass are still there? This ship is really sophisticated. The trees and grass may have grown naturally. # Johnny Veitch on Friday, December 11, 1998 - 1:44 pm: After Tuvok is made blind (presumably because of the incident with the chronaton torpedo) he tells the computer to activate a "tactile interface" In other words, a series of bumps suddenly sprang out of the console? Ed Jefferson (Ejefferson) on Saturday, December 12, 1998 - 4:49 pm: Some kind of forcefield (like the one that allows the Doctor to touch things). # Chris Thomas on Saturday, December 12, 1998 - 2:51 am: How *does* Tuvok, and Seven for that matter, survive that bomb blast? Surely they should have been killed because they didn't get out in time? Perhaps the explosion was out of phase, just like the one created by the cloaked Romulan Disruptor at the end of The Next Phase (TNG)? # Marten on Sunday, February 14, 1999 - 9:27 am: Regarding Tuvok’s blindness - Tuvok has inner eyelids, so he should've been saved, provided he got a forcefield up in time. Mike Konczewski on Monday, February 15, 1999 - 12:20 pm: Marten--You're assuming Tuvok's blindness was caused by excessive light. It looks to me as if he's suffered corneal damage, probably from the flames. Marten on Monday, February 15, 1999 - 4:52 pm: You might be right. I did notice that his eyelids seemed 'wrong' somehow, however if you are in a small tunnel and there's an *explosion* in that tunnel, whatever is in that tunnel will be shot out of said tunnel at tremendous speed. (Consider how a *gun* works.) They could've never ever survived. Mike Konczewski on Tuesday, February 16, 1999 - 6:27 am: True; it would have made more sense to have shown Tuvok with some scars or burn marks. I don't remember if it was an explosion or a burst of flame. That would affect whether there was a substantial amount of flying debris or not. Marten on Tuesday, February 16, 1999 - 7:26 pm: Well frankly I think TPTB did it wrong. The torpedo, while it was in temporal flux to pierce the shields, basically was a normal warhead, designed to hurt not tickle the enemy. I took a close look at Tuvok in the scene and he didnt seem to be erecting a force field. He and seven should be dead. But then, it's in the script I’m sure. Perhaps they cut the 'explanatory' shot out for timing reasons, since I can imagine a bright torpedo explosion flash can blind someone on the other side by radiation etc. # BrianB on Sunday, July 11, 1999 - 12:15 am: Does anybody find it odd that PARIS "modifies" force fields to serve as "transverse bulheads" as inspired by the Titanic? Guess his engineering talents is the best-kept secret. He IS a fan of 20th century history! # So Seven knows the history of First Contact. Guess da Borg learned it from The Raven's database 18 years ago (sans Enterprise-E involvement).Perhaps it had become a - classified - element of established history. # Remember Before and After, where Kes' death-to-birth lifetime was supposed to give V'ger heads-up on the dreaded Krenim race? She recorded the time variance on that torpedo. She was going to report the Krenim to Janeway a year ago. V'ger should've avoided the Krenim or else augment their shields according to the torpedo's time variance. Alfonso Turnage on Sunday, July 11, 1999 - 8:41 pm: Yes, that was a SUPER NIT. I'm extremely surprised that the Kes warning was not mentioned. Brian Lombard on Thursday, January 18, 2001 - 5:37 am: I've been giving a lot of thought to the whole Kes issue regarding this episode. Why is it that her warning from Before and After went unheeded. And here's the answer. Before and After never happened. In order for that story to work, it must begin in the future. It's the Doctor's experiment so many years in the future that sets Kes on her backward journey through time. Yes, in Before and After she arrives before the Year of Hell and gives Janeway a warning. However, as we see in The Gift, Kes does not live to be an old woman living on the ship and raising a family. She never went into the biowhatever chamber, and she never went on her time travel. This means she never gave Janeway the warning. # Q on Tuesday, December 21, 1999 - 8:00 pm: Why not give Tuvok a VISOR? Surely they have the technology Geordi had years ago on the Enterprise-D. How much energy does it take to replicate such a small device? And it makes more sense to have a fully functional Tactical Officer in the midst of a tactical situation. Jwb52z on Thursday, December 23, 1999 - 7:21 pm: The problem with your idea about the VISOR, Q, is that it requires brain surgery to implant the technology that transfers the VISOR's messages to the brain, as seen by those blinking things on Geordi's temples before he got the ocular implants. Mark Swinton on Sunday, January 09, 2000 - 5:22 pm: Furthermore, throughout TNG there was a very strong implication that Geordi's treatment was somewhat rare. Seniram 17:49, February 7, 2018 (UTC) Plus the fact that that the required surgery would be regarded as very specialised. # Keith Alan Morgan (Kmorgan) on Tuesday, July 17, 2001 - 4:46 am: When the Krinnum change time the second and third times in this episode, Voyager detects the space-time shockwave. So why doesn't Voyager detect anything when the Zall colony is destroyed at the beginning of the show? On Day 1 the Krinnum destroys a Zall colony, but there is no apparent change. Later it is learned that they have been changing time for 200 years. In Part II Chakotay runs a simulation of what would happen if they eliminated a comet from time and the simulation shows the results. So why wasn't a simulation run on what the erasure of the Zall colony would do? The pronunciation of the race seems to be a little different from Before and After. I believe it was pronounced Krinnum in Before And After, while in this episode they pronounce it Krennum. In Before and After, Kes warns them that they are soon to enter Krinnum space and it is implied that they will take precautions to avoid this. The date of the Krinnum attack is given as 50973 in that episode, which would indicate that Krinnum space is prior to Borg space, not after. (This probably should have been the season ending cliffhanger.) An additional problem is that when Kes' mental powers expanded in The Gift, she pushed Voyager ten years closer to home, so the Stardate really should have been something like 62245, maybe. (Although maybe the Krinnum timeship might have just eliminated the Borg and expanded their empire so that Voyager could have encountered them earlier, but when Kes pushed them ahead they encountered the timeship before that deed could have been planned and accomplished?) Nove Rockhoomer on Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - 3:49 pm: It was mentioned in Before and After that a lot of the crew had chronoton poisoning and were inoculated. They all had some trace amounts left, but they never became a problem until the Doc used the biotemporal chamber on Kes. So, in other words, Seven and Tuvok wouldn't start traveling backwards in time due to exposure to the torpedo. Here's how I make sense of the "Kes issue": Say Kes is at point six in time. She tells them what's been happening to her and they hadn't known about it previously. Next, Kes goes to point five (earlier), where she tells them again. But since she told them at point five, they should have known about it at point six. Why didn't they? You could say she's changing history when she goes back each time, but if she was changing it, she would be changing it in the other direction (so that they would remember). The only way this makes sense is to say that Kes is either creating, or simply traveling to, a different timeline each time she jumps. One of those timelines appears to be the same as what I call Timeline B from this episode (war with the Krennim). But what about timeline A (the main Voyager timeline)? It's possible that when she jumped for the last time and gave Janeway the warning, she was not in Timeline A, but a different one. Therefore, the warning is irrelevant because she never told the Janeway from Timeline A, which explains why this episode never mentioned it. Also, remember that in Timeline B, we never saw the first encounter with the Krennim. Maybe they did have the warning, but encountered the Krennim despite their efforts to avoid it. All we know is that in Timeline A, the warning wasn't mentioned. The problem with this theory is that "Before and After" could have ended in a different timeline from all the other episodes, even though upon viewing it, it appears to be the same one. I don't particularly like to believe that, but there it is. ' # ''CuttytheCritic on Friday, September 02, 2011 - 4:32 am: About halfway through the episode, Seven enters a Jeffries' Tube and discovers the undetonated temporal torpedo. In order to enter the tube, she uses the suction cup thingy that serves as the 'manual override' for various automated doors throughout Voyager. She must do this because, as stated during the rescue of B'elenna and Kim, the power has rendered most of the doors (and the turbolift) inoperational. However, after Seven enters the tube, as she is crawling down it, the doors slide shut behind her, obviously under full power. Perhaps only the turbo lifts were down, but if it WAS only the turbolift that was down, and the door was in fact powered, then why did she have to open it with a suction cup in the first place? '''The power to the doors could be intermittently available. Notes Category:Episodes Category:Voyager